How to easily convert fluorescent Lights to LED –Easy Ways to Save Money

[Music] welcome DIY wires Chris here with tool box DIY and today I'm going to show you how to convert a traditional fluorescent tube fixture to use the more energy-efficient and maintenance friendly LED light tubes I'm going to jump right into this conversion process but you should know that picking an LED ball can be a little bit tricky so stick around after I complete this and I'll walk through how to choose the bulb that's right for you and as always if you have any questions or need clarification about this video please feel free to post those questions or comments down below and also please help support future videos by subscribing to the toolbox DIY Channel now with my shameless plug out of the way let's go ahead and get started I'm going to cover the tools and materials needed for this simple project the tools you'll need include a screwdriver likely a Philips head but you may need a flathead depending on how your ballast is installed you also need wire strippers and a way to cut wires if your wire strippers have a cutter you can use those but I prefer to use side cutters for that job you may also find needle nose pliers to be handy when removing your lamp holders now on to the materials you'll obviously need LED light tubes this one here is a single-ended which I'll go into more detail about later because it's single ended I also need a non shunted lamp holder I need one of these for every bulb that I plan on replacing for the wiring I need two wire connectors I like these push and wire connectors you could also use wire nuts one for hot and one for neutral and I find it's also handy to have some nylon zip ties for tying up extra wire and getting it out of the way the first step in this process is to disconnect the power at the circuit breaker we don't want any electricity to be able to flow through this circuit while we're doing this after that you'll want to remove the existing fluorescent tubes and then you don't want you're going to want to remove the reflector now light fixtures differ this particular one has these clips that need to be removed yours might have screws that need to be removed we need to remove this so we can access the wiring once we have that exposed you'll see three wire nuts one on the black one on the white and one on the green you'll want to unscrew the wire nuts on the black and the white wires now at this point you have a decision to make you can work with the fixture on the ceiling which saves you the trouble of removing it or you can take it down I chose to take it down not only so I can show you how to do this but I find that it's a lot easier it was only four screws to take it down and so if you choose to do that you'll also need to remove the wire nut on the grounding wire so you'll remove all three now with the reflector out of the way and this ready to go let's get started on removing the ballast and changing the lamp holders remove the ballasts by cutting the wires near the ballast if the ballast is still good and you want to keep it leave enough wires for future use the two ballast in this fixture are both bad so I'll be disposing of those the hardware store after you cut the wires take your screwdriver and unscrew the mounting screw that holds the ballast in place after you do that reinstall that screw in its mounting hole that way you don't lose it if you ever need to use it again now on this ballast I'm actually going to cut off some of the black and white wires to use this pigtail wires that I'll demonstrate shortly now we're going to remove the existing lamp holders also known as tombstones I'm using single-ended LEDs which I'll go into more detail about that a little bit later but this means I need to replace the lamp holders these non shunted lamp holders with shunted lamp holders but I only need to do that for one end of each bulb so I'm going to use I'm going to replace all six of these that will service three bulbs on each side and I'm going to do the ones here because it'll make wiring a lot easier now to get these out there are little tabs on each size that you need to press in and push it through if your fixture is like mine that's made a little bit easier by just removing this so now we can pinch these ends probably easier to do one end at a time and we'll do that for all six now we take our new tombstones and they just snap in from the other side underside if you can't remove the bracket here for the tombstones it's quite easy just to push them through the underside they pop right in so we'll do all six of those so now we're ready to wire all these tombstones together and we'll use these push in wire connectors so we'll separate all of the neutrals and all of the hots since those all those wires will each be combined into one of these so we just push those in and once they go in they won't come out [Applause] now I want to install a pigtail on each of these so rather than taking my watt home wiring and pushing the wire directly into here by using a pigtail I can twist on to that wire that way if I ever need to remove the fixture it's much easier to do so so I'm just taking the wire that was left over from the old ballasts and I'll strip each end to make these pigtails okay now we'll clean this up by wrapping up the extra and using some zip ties to keep it out of the way [Music] now on the other ends of the fixture the lamp holders serve no electrical purpose but they are important because these are the lamp holders that actually secure the other end of the light tube so we can reuse the existing holders and we don't need to replace the ones that you see here now if you have any wires that are loose from cutting out the ballast we probably want to get those out of the way so we'll just bundle those up and secure them with some zip ties so that concludes the wiring portion of this so now I'm going to get the light reinstalled on the ceiling so we can then make our electrical connections the pigtail wires we installed into the wire connectors allow us to easily connect to the electrical circuit using wire nuts so we'll connect those black to black white to white and ground to ground and after that we're ready to reinstall the light reflectors and then install the bulbs with these LED bulbs the light reflector doesn't do much reflecting since LED lights are constructed to direct the light downward unlike the fluorescent tubes that emit light in every direction around the tube however the reflectors are important because they hide the wiring and it would look kind of funny if you didn't reinstall them okay with everything installed now we're ready to turn on the power at the breaker and test our lights there you have it everything works now we have a functioning light using LED tubes so that covers the conversion for changing your fluorescent light fixture to use LED tubes very simple and it doesn't take much time at all it'll probably take about a half an hour per fixture once you get the hang of it it'll probably take you less time than that the tricky part about this is choosing the right LED bulb so let's take a minute to talk about the different LED bulbs available and why I chose this one LED tubes are either single ended or double ended the ones I just installed our single ended which means wiring is applied to only one end of the tube one pin is for the hot and the other pin is for the neutral double-ended LED tubes get wiring at both ends one in four hot the other end for neutral so why choose one over the other well the double-ended LED tubes have the advantage that they can typically be used with the existing lamp holders in your fixture however at the time of this filming there are far fewer double-ended LED choices on the market also there have been some safety concerns that have been raised by individuals about double-ended LED tubes and not being ul certified even though they say they are but I'll leave it to you to decide if they're right for you and to do your own research single-ended LED tubes are much easier to find however these require replacing while typically replacing at least one of the lamp holders per bulb in your fixture the lamp holders required are called non shunted lamp holders a shunted lamp holder is quite common in fluorescent fixtures and what this means is that the connection points inside the connector are shorted or connected together this would create an electrical short so if you use that you wouldn't actually get power to the LED tube so we have to replace one end lamp holder with a non shunted connector just like the ones that I use in the conversion that you just watch there are two ways to tell if you have shunted or non shunted tombstones if there's one wire going to the tombstone that's typically shunted and also here this one has two wires but it's daisy chaining a lamp holder over here which means there is a short inside here to make that connection over here so it is shunted the other way to determine if you have shunted or non shunted is to use a multimeter here's an inexpensive multimeter that's set to measure resistance if these are shunted the resistance should be extremely low like in the single digits so what we do I have to turn these because they have a locking connector on them I turn it so I can expose both sides of the contacts and then I probe here if I can get it done correctly you see there I've got a resistance of about 5 ohms it's kind of fluctuating that would indicate that it is shunted if it were non shunted I wouldn't get much of a reading at all in fact let's take let's take one of the non shunt that I have and try that so here we have a non shunt they're like the ones that I installed and if we probe these two connections we get nothing because they are not connected or shorted the second feature of LED bulbs you want to look for is whether or not they require a ballast some do some don't and some give you the option of using a ballast or not personally I recommend removing or bypassing your ballast I recommend this because ballasts fail I've replaced five I think yeah five ballast in the last three years and quite frankly I'm tired of doing that so if you remove it or you bypass it you'll save yourself potentially a future repair that really doesn't serve much purpose lastly you'll want to look at the output and the color temperature of the bulb to figure out what's right for you the output of a bulb the amount of light that it produces is measured in lumens the higher that number the more light that will produce the color is measured as a temperature called Kelvin if you like a warm orange or yellow color you'll want to look for a 3000 Kelvin light if you like a more cool white then look for a 4 to 45 hundred Kelvin sorry 4,000 to 4,500 Kelvin and if you like more of a daylight than you'll want a 5000 Kelvin or higher well that concludes today's how-to video for converting your fluorescent light fixture to use the new LED light tubes thanks for joining me and be sure to subscribe to the toolbox DIY YouTube channel for updates on future videos I'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: ToolboxDIY

Views: 3,246,729

Rating: 4.6950808 out of 5

Keywords: Convert flourescent to LED, Fluorescent to LED, Fluorescent to LED Conversion, How to easily convert fluorescent Lights to LED, LED conversion, LED tube, Ways to Convert Your Fluorescent Light to LED, convert fluorescent lights to leds, florescent to led, flourescent to led, fluorescent to led conversion, led florescent, led flourescent, led lights, led replacement bulbs, led retrofit, led tube light installation, replace fluorescent light fixture with led, t8 replacement

Id: SCWoI0X4jw0

Length: 13min 36sec (816 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 09 2017